Peter Marheine:
I often find that imposed limitations make it easier to create things: it’s easy to aim for perfection if you can expend as much effort as you like on something and thus end up with nothing that you’ll ever call good enough to share. Over on Cemetech in the final months of 2023, we held a programming contest: write a screensaver, any kind of screensaver. I’m not often one to do any kind of competitive programming, but as a prompt for a constrained project this was a good one for me. As a result, I wrote a program I called WEB1999, that won second place.
Inspired heavily by the Realistic Internet Simulator (“Kill the Pop-ups”), WEB1999 invokes the spirit of pop-up advertising and Internet culture around the turn of the millennium in the form of a program that runs on Texas Instruments’ TI-84+ CE color-screen graphing calculators.
Some of the earliest programs I wrote were on my TI-83 in high school, so I have a soft spot for TI graphing calculators. In fact, my TI-89 from university still lives on my desk and sees regular use.
This WEB1999 project combines nostalgia for TI graphing calculators, and the early web, what’s not to love.